The aim of this paper is threefold. First, this study introduces the context of objectivity in modernist poetry, especially Moore’s objectivity and Williams’s objectivity. Second, it differentiates T. S. Eliot’s objectivity from their objectivity. In doing so, this paper analyzes the poems in Prufrock and Other Observations according to the different type of observation and the different type of persona. The poetics of observation in Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations is dramatic, psychological, and complex. His manner of observation is more inward looking than Moore’s, and his poetics of exploring urban reality is more dramatic and psychological than Williams’s. Third, this paper intends to rescue Eliot from Williams’s harsh criticism against him. From Williams’s point of view, Eliot’s poetry represents the “old” world spirit. However, Eliot’s seemingly traditional way of dealing with the world is so resilient that we can appreciate his work even after the age of Eliot and across geographical borders.

This study will explore Eliot’s later poetics through Four Quartets and his later criticism in the sense that Four Quartets reveals the social function of poetry and poets, and his remarks on other poets give us some important clues to his own later poetry. A recurring theme in Eliot’s writings on language, in particular the English language can be described in the following terms: what a poet does to the common speech, and what he does for it. Eliot addressed considerable thought to the issue of linguistic change and originality and to the poet’s particular role as both an innovator and preserver of language. The first point is that language must involve change and creativity, because of its functions as the structuring medium of our experience and as a tool which both reflects and serves our needs and interests in coping with the world. To quote “Little Gidding,” “poetry must purify the dialect of the tribe.” Next, we arrive at a final question in Eliot’s thinking about poetic language: can its “realizing” powers touch something beyond human unreality? In a way to search for the answer, the music of poetry begins to take on more and more importance, partly because Eliot feels that it can express the inexpressible. It would be an error, however, to link Four Quartets with music too hastily. Eliot brings music and meaning together, and recognizes them as a unity. He was also wary of any equation of music with mellifluousness or sonority. At any rate, I suppose, the most important of all Eliot’s ideas related to the “music of poetry” is that of the vital relation of poetry to common speech. Four Quartets is one of the most sustained meditations in our tradition on the problems of language and rhetoricity as they bear on practical and poetic expressions of the negative and positive ways alike. Certainly, it is a poem that discusses its own poetics.